


Through the Eyes of an Abomination

by Ihc



Category: Lilo & Stitch (2002)
Genre: Action/Adventure, Retelling
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-29
Updated: 2017-07-29
Packaged: 2018-12-08 07:18:56
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 9,897
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11641671
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ihc/pseuds/Ihc
Summary: The events of the opening of Lilo and Stitch, from the trial up until Stitch waking up in the animal shelter, retold from Stitch’s perspective, illustrating his thought process. Escaping a heavily guarded prison spaceship and flying to an unknown planet is harder than it looks!





	1. Chapter 1

Darkness. Light. Darkness. Light. Darkness. Light.

Experiment 626 growled in annoyance and pulled his lower eyelids down, stretching the skin until it hurt. He let go and blinked his eyes. Darkness again. If they didn’t let him out of this stupid container soon, he was going to die of boredom.

Most sapient species in the galaxy possessed an innate sense of time, even those that had evolved on planets with no cycle of day and night. But, as a rule, that sense was only vague, and could easily be disrupted by fluctuating levels of light, temperature, or other environmental variables. The few exceptions were mostly species that had cybernetically enhanced themselves with timekeeping chips in their brains. 626 was different. Instead of a computer chip, his brain contained a tiny gland, barely larger than a pinhead, filled with custom-designed oscillating macromolecules that gave him a precise internal clock. In Earth units, it was only accurate to about a minute per week, inferior to even mechanical clocks, but it was enough to let him know that he’d been trapped in the tiny chamber for six hours, forty minutes, and around nineteen seconds… twenty. 

He’d let the security officers force him into the container at gunpoint believing he could easily escape. But the curved polyglass walls offered no purchase for his claws, and the metal underneath lacked even the slightest seam he could use to grip the glass and pull it free of the base. It was pitch dark, so dark that even 626’s sensitive eyes couldn’t see his brightly colored prison uniform in front of his face. His eyes could switch to the infrared spectrum by blinking, but this was of little use. All it showed was that the container’s walls were cold, which he already knew. He was briefly able to entertain himself by using his body heat to draw patterns on the walls, but not for long.

Suddenly, the container jolted sideways, knocking 626 off balance. His ears perked up at the sound of motors whining, an automated door sliding open and then slamming shut, and the buzz of conversation.

“…Only theoretical, completely within legal boundaries,” a familiar accented voice said. Jumba Jookiba, the scientist who had created him, and the only creature he’d really interacted with. Right… Jumba had been arrested. 626 had initially escaped, and led the police on a wild goose chase for a full day before finally getting captured.

“We believe you actually created something,” said a harsher female voice.

“Created something?” Jumba laughed. “Ha! That would be irresponsible, and unethical. I would never, _ever…_ ”

The container jolted to a halt, then downward, and started to spin. The experience of being moved around without any sensory reference was profoundly disorienting. 626 didn’t move from his upright position, but he dug his footclaws into the base of the container to stabilize himself. He felt the beginnings of nausea. Jumba had done his best to program ‘space legs’ into his experiments’ instincts, but hours of sensory deprivation were enough to throw off even a genetically engineered monstrosity, as 626 had found out on the shuttle that had taken him from Kweltikwan to wherever this was. There was a reason passenger cabins on spacecraft were equipped with viewscreens. Prisoners were simply suspended upside-down during launches. This was worse, though. If he was sick in here, there was no room to get away from it. He wondered if the galactic council would feel sorry for him then. Probably not: they’d just blast him with a hose again. Luckily, the movement stopped after a couple seconds, and the metal cover over the glass was abruptly removed.

“…Make more than one?” Jumba trailed off. Evidently the trial was not going well.

626 squinted and snarled as the lights of the councilroom flooded his eyes. He dropped to all sixes, snapped at the walls, and threw himself against them, causing the floating platform that held his container to sway dangerously. The masses of beings lining the walls of the enormous chamber gasped and recoiled. They were scared of him? Good. Maybe one of them would fall out of its stupid chair pod.

“What is that monstrosity?” a deep voice boomed. 626 immediately pinpointed the source, and had to suppress a laugh. Monstrosity? Look who was talking! The being towered over every other creature in the chamber; he was at least three times Jumba’s height. And what a face! 

“Monstrosity?” Jumba repeated in an offended tone. “What you see before you is the first of a new species…” 

626 rapidly tuned out Jumba’s speech. It was nothing interesting, just the kind of stuff the scientist liked to mutter to himself while he worked. The experiment turned to climbing all over the walls of the container, staring at the assortment of aliens. How were they _not_ bored? 

“It is an affront to nature,” the ugly giant said as if it were an obvious fact. “It must be destroyed!” 626 made a point of ignoring him. Let him come over and try it! 

“Calm yourself, Captain Gantu,” said the tall, thin female being 626 had identified as being in charge. Great. Big Ugly was a captain. “Perhaps it can be reasoned with.” Yeah, right. 626 wasn’t interested in reasoning with anyone who called him an ‘it,’ especially not when they had him trapped in a tiny glass jar so they could gawk at him like an insect. The thin being continued: “Experiment 626… give us some sign you understand any of this. Show us that there is something inside you that is good.” 

626 straightened up and cleared his throat, buying himself time to think carefully about his response. The councilors mostly looked surprised: evidently they all thought he was some sort of mindless animal! His first impulse was to say something insulting, but would that hurt Jumba’s case? His mind rapidly pieced together the fragments of conversation he’d ignored. He noted the absence of a defense attorney, the conversations from guards claiming that the trial was over ‘illegal genetic experiments,’ and Jumba’s admitting that he, 626, was a monster and gleefully bragging about his destructive capabilities. So… it was a show trial. Jumba had already lost, and he knew it. He wasn’t even trying to defend himself because 626’s mere existence was incontrovertible evidence of his guilt. Well, in that case 626 was going to lose the case in _style._ He paused for dramatic effect, waited until he was sure that every eye or other sense organ in the chamber was on him, and gave the Galactic Council his best innocent smile. Then he proudly said the rudest, most obscene phrase he could think of. “ _Meega nala kweesta!_ ” ( _Untransatable)._

The effect was better than 626 could have possibly imagined. Gasps of shock and horror filled the air, and some of the councilors even lost their lunches. He bounced up and down in his container, giggling at the chaos he’d managed to cause with just three words. 

“So naughty!” gasped the thin creature.

“I didn’t teach him that!” protested Jumba. This was actually true: 626 had learned the phrase and its particular obscene inflection from one of his arresting officers after he’d thrown a fire extinguisher in the bulky arachnoid’s face.

Gantu didn’t seem to care about this, though. “Place that idiot scientist under arrest!” he ordered. A larger polyglass case materialized over Jumba’s platform. 626 thought it should have been there much earlier; Jumba had nearly fallen off the thing during his boasting. 

“I prefer to be called Evil Genius!” Jumba shouted as his platform descended out of sight. 626 noticed him suppressing a laugh. At least _someone_ appreciated his wit. He wondered how hard it would be to break Jumba out of prison.

 

As it turned out, the council’s plans for 626 rendered such a rescue impossible. His pod was hovered away, then filled with choking gas that stunned him while he was roughly shoved into a restraining collar and loaded onto a shuttle. Half an hour being jostled around in a thunderstorm during the ascent to orbit caused the barely-edible glop he’d been fed before being shoved into the container to make an encore appearance, which led to an angry guard whacking him over the head with the end of a mop and spraying cleaning solution in his eyes. By the time the shuttle had docked to the main transport ship, the experiment was ready to bite the head off any creature that got near him. Unfortunately, the white-suited security officers kept well out of reach. One of them grabbed a large syringe on the end of a stick, maneuvering the needle away from 626’s teeth, and jabbed it roughly into his neck like a soldier bayoneting a foe. 626 let out an involuntary squeak of pain and gritted his teeth. He could hear his blood gush into the polyglass vial, driven by gravity and his racing heart. That was _it!_ He was breaking out of this place right now!

…or not. A guard placed the vial in a slot on one of two enormous guns hanging from the ceiling on either side of him, and both trained themselves on his head. 626 felt a twinge of fear. He knew he was supposed to be bulletproof, but each of the five barrels on the rotary cannons was the size of his head! When did it stop being a bullet and start being artillery?

Then he heard the voice he least wanted to hear. Big Ugly, AKA Captain Gantu. “Uncomfortable?” the Captain said mockingly. “Aww… _Good._ ” 626 wanted nothing more than to be free of the collar so he could show the giant the meaning of the word uncomfortable. He tugged at the restraints, and felt the metal creak ominously. He was pretty sure he could break it. The huge idiot was standing so close that he couldn’t order the cannons to fire without getting blown up himself, and 626 could easily climb onto his back. The reason why became apparent shortly. “The Council has banished you to exile on a desert asteroid. So relax, enjoy the trip!” Gantu gloated. “And don’t get any ideas! These guns are locked onto your genetic signature. They won’t shoot anyone but _you…_ ” he jammed his fat, clammy finger into 626’s face. Able to stand the indignity no longer, 626 snarled and bit down. He didn’t use all his strength – if he had, he would have taken an enormous chunk out of the captain’s fingertip – but it was enough to make Gantu bellow in pain and pull his finger back with a set of bloody toothmarks. “Why you…” the hand returned holding a gigantic blaster, large enough for Jumba to put his arm down the barrel. Said barrel was pressed against 626’s head. Oops.

Luckily, the guard, a shark-like creature about twice 626’s height, took the opportunity to remind the captain that he was on duty, and the giant stomped away, ordering: “Secure the cell!”

“Aye-aye, captain!” the guard said with a salute.

“Aye-aye, captain!” 626 mimicked in a sing-song voice as soon as the cell’s iris door slammed shut. The guard glared.

Soon enough, the ship started to accelerate, thrusting clear of Planet Turo’s gravity well in preparation to jump to hyperspace. It was smooth enough that 626 barely felt it over the ship’s artificial gravity field, but there were small jolts as the engines roared to life.

626 waited until the guard had settled down in his chair before he started complaining. “ _Isa kaua tiki shan?_ ” ( _Are we there yet?_ ) he asked. “ _Isa kaua tiki shan? Isa kaua tiki shan?_ ”

The guard rolled his eyes and spun his chair around.

“ _Aka boocha! Aka boocha! Aka-choota baquaa!_ ” 626 whined.

The guard ground his teeth and swiveled his chair again. “If you’re trying to talk to me, say it in Standard!”

“Uhh… okay…” 626 had to think for a second. While his brain could calculate trajectories, simulate combat scenarios, and just plain daydream with incredible speed, he wasn’t very good at languages, especially not anything besides Tantalog. “Let… six-two-six out?”

“How stupid do you think I am?” asked the guard, pointing an accusatory finger at him.

“Six-two-six… gotta go… toilet?” This wasn’t just an attempt to trick the guard into releasing him. According to his mental clock, 626 had been either stuck in a tiny container or suspended upside-down for close to ten hours now. It had also been ten hours since he’d drank any water, but his bladder was still starting to ache.

“Well, you should have gone before we left!”

626 pouted. “Didn’t have to then…” He was quiet for a while, then started again. “ _Isa kaua tiki shan? Isa kaua tiki shan? Isa kaua tiki shan?_ ”

The guard growled. 626 saw his fists clench and unclench, but his next words were calm. “Did you know my home planet has the largest waterfall in the whole Nu Quadrant?” he said. “It’s over half a klick tall and four klicks wide. In the rainy season, enough water goes over it every five seconds to fill this whole ship!”

“ _Yuuga Isa Kaphong!_ ” 626 protested, flattening his ears. The guns twitched.

“The only monster around here is you,” retorted the guard. 626 replied with whatever insults he could think of. “You know what else we have a lot of on my planet?” the guard said with a sadistic grin, “Caves. With lots of stalagmites and stalactites. Do you know how a stalactite forms, you little trog?”

“Naga.”

“Water _leeaaaaksss_ out of the cave ceiling, and slowly runs _down_ the stalactite all the way to the bottom, and drips off. Drip. Drip. Drip. Drip.”

“ _Naga! Naga! Aggaba! Aggaba!_ ” 626 screamed, folding his ears back against his head and curling his antennae. “Six-two-six be good!” How could the guard be so cruel? It was obvious what the shark-faced alien meant. He was dangling upside-down from the ceiling of the cell! If the voyage to the prison asteroid took too long, _he_ would end up like the stalactite!

Eventually, though, boredom set in again. 626 remembered the guns’ slight movement when he flattened his ears, and realized he could make a game out of it. He waved his ears and antennae back and forth, and twisted his head as much as he could within the confines of the collar. Yep. They were following him. Then he had an idea. The guns were locked onto his genetic signature, Gantu said. Where had they gotten his DNA? From his blood! The wound in his neck had bled a little after the needle was removed, but his fur had soaked it up. What would happen if it dripped onto the floor? Were the guns smart enough to tell it apart from his body? The easiest way to make himself bleed would be to scratch himself, but he couldn’t move his limbs. Digging his claws into his palm might still work, but a few drops of blood might not run down far enough. He would have to bite his tongue. Or maybe not… he already had a different bodily fluid in his mouth. Would it work the same way?

Opening his mouth, he let a thick ribbon of saliva dangle almost to the floor, then slurped it back up. He giggled at the stupidity of the cannons: they swiveled downward, following the saliva instead of him, and for the first time since they’d been activated their aim moved away from him. Up… down… up… down… up…. Down. Yep, it worked. And better yet, there was a slight, but noticeable delay in the guns’ reaction to his movement. He had the beginnings of an escape plan. But there were still too many unknowns. The saliva was still attached to his body: the guns could have mistaken it for a tentacle or pseudopod. On the other hand, a tentacle that long could have reached out and touched the guns, potentially disabling them, yet they didn’t fire to prevent it. That meant it was just a simple tracking algorithm. But what was the trigger for them to fire? When his saliva touched the floor? When the restraining collar broke? He couldn’t safely test it; even if the guns didn’t vaporize his saliva and then turn to the next genetic signature, him, the guards would be immediately alerted. The guns’ reactions appeared to be slow enough that he could potentially spit on one and cause it to destroy the other, but too fast for him to do it to both at the same time. The remaining gun wouldn’t have to swivel far to get him in its sights, either. He needed to make them shoot as far away from him as possible, then immediately force the collar open, jump down onto one cannon, jump to the other as it fired, destroying the first cannon, and then tear out the power conduit for the second.

The guard, who had pulled a pack of cards from his jacket pocket and was trying to play some sort of solitary game, rolled his eyes and swiveled his chair around again. “Quiet, you!” he snapped.

626 growled. He had to deal with the guard! He couldn’t see a weapon on him; anything small enough to be concealed wouldn’t be a direct threat, but even a tiny electrode gun could distract him for long enough to get him killed. The shark-like alien _was_ fairly far from him, though. There wasn’t going to be a better opportunity to escape. 626 gathered up as much saliva in his mouth as he could, and spat it out at the guard’s feet. Sure enough, both cannons whipped around to track the glob, and all ten barrels fired the moment it hit the floor.

The blast shook the entire cell and blew a massive crater in the floor. The guard stood flattened against the doors, knees trembling as he stared at the smoldering hole where he’d been sitting a second before. “What’s going on down there?” a voice said over the intercom. 626 laughed. Now the shoe was on the other foot. And while the crater was a mess of wires, pipes, and twisted, half-molten metal, useless for escape, it had given him a valuable piece of information. The cell wasn’t built to withstand the weaponry installed in it. Never mind destroying the cannons: they could work for him! He spat again, scoring a direct hit on the guard’s insignia-bearing hat.

The shot had gone higher than Experiment 626 intended: he’s been aiming for the spot right between the guard’s eyes. Even so, the alien would have died if he hadn’t had the sense to abandon his cap and dive for cover. The cannons opened fire with all barrels, tearing through the iris doors like they were made of tissue paper. More and more shots landed, spraying red-hot debris around the cell and into the corridor beyond. 626 was glad he wasn’t on the receiving end of the barrage. Now was his chance!

The crew of the prisoner transport ship Durgon had been made aware of Jumba Jookiba’s claim that his creation could lift three thousand times his weight. Most believed the ‘idiot scientist’ was exaggerating, but they still selected the strongest collar available to restrain the experiment, one that should have been capable of withstanding the monster’s attempts to break free, but only just. But they had made two critical mistakes. First, after capturing the experiment they had recorded his body mass, then calculated his strength based on his weight in Federation Standard Gravity (approximately twenty percent stronger than Earth’s gravity). But Jumba had been referring to the gravity on his homeworld Kweltikwan, a large metal-rich planet with gravity a little over twice that strong. Second, Jumba had obtained the figure in the ‘controlled’ environment of his own lab, carefully subjecting his creation to greater and greater amounts of force with an industrial press. So when 626, faced with the prospect of having the plasma cannons that had just obliterated a solid steel door turned on him, pulled on the restraining collar with all his strength, it was simply ripped in half. 

626 dropped from the ceiling, already calculating how to deal with the still active cannons. By the time he reached the ground, landing awkwardly on his head, he’d decided. He grabbed the solid metal pieces of the restraining collar and made a run for it, leaping over the crater in the floor. The collar prevented the plasma balls from hitting him directly, but he was still showered by stinging-hot molten metal, and the impacts knocked him sideways. No sooner was he out of the guns’ range than he spotted a blast door, much thicker than the cell doors, closing in his path. Throwing aside the remains of the collar, he raced towards it. No… not quick enough, there wasn’t space to fit through! But he got his paws under it, and pulling with all his strength he was able to force the door upward for long enough to slip under it. 626 was in his element; his brain was in hyperdrive, scanning every detail of his environment for danger, cover, obstacles, potential weapons, and somewhere behind him the guard rolling on the floor trying to put out his smoldering uniform. But it didn’t feel like it. His heart was pounding in his chest so loud that his ears could pick it up over the blaring alarms, voices shouting over the intercom, and rapidly approaching footsteps. His ears rang from the explosions, his arms ached, and he felt like he would be sick again.

But there was no time to be sick. Just as the blast door slammed shut behind him, three white-suited marines rounded the corner, blocking his path. They opened fire, barely missing 626. He could feel more spattered metal from the blast door punch holes in his prison uniform and congeal in his fur. What now? Did he charge them? Climb up to the ceiling? No, on the left – a vent! He dived for it, ripping the grille off and scrambling inside just in time to avoid another plasma blast. Where now? Higher, and forward against the acceleration he’d felt when the engines started, towards the bridge! He heard explosions behind him. Someone was shooting the duct. He ripped through the top and climbed into a space between bulkheads. ‘Bridge Primary Electric’… perfect. His claws made short work of the electrical cables. Now back into the vent, up through a floor panel, and into the docking bay. He scrambled up the wall and onto the ceiling, then dropped down on an unfortunate guard, tossing him aside and grabbing his gun. There were over a dozen fighter-sized ships to pick from – which one? The red one, of course. Red ships went faster, Jumba always said. Then again, Jumba had also complained about the police giving him and his red ship tickets for supersonic flight in the troposphere.

After sending every guard in sight diving for cover with a shower of blaster shots, 626 jumped through the open docking port of the red police cruiser and slammed the hatch shut. He’d never flown a real spaceship before, only sims, but that would only matter if he could get the thing started in the first place. Fortunately, single-pilot craft like this were incredibly easy to hotwire. The docking clamp released, both engines roared to life, and he rocketed away, scorching the paint off part of the Durgon’s hull in the process. Engines? Check. Cabin pressure? Check. O2? Check. Siren and horn? Check. Now… Jumba had to still be on the planet they’d just left. Looking back, he recognized it from the maps as Turo, the capital of the Galactic Federation. Plasma bolts flying past him? Check? Seventy-nine police cruisers behind him? Check?

626 didn’t care. At least he was off the transport! And now he could fly rings around the federation pilots just by throwing a couple of switches. Artificial gravity? Off. He needed all the engine power he could get! The cruiser surged ahead. G-limiters? Off. He pushed the control stick forward, pitching the ship over in a maneuver that would have burst the blood vessels in the eyes of many species. That was when he remembered he’d forgotten his seat belt. Luckily, he _did_ have two more arms than he needed to operate the controls. Now he was upside-down relative to his pursuers, and they were below him. That would make their shots more likely to hit his ship’s more durable underside, but it also put them out of his field of vision. He rolled the cruiser to the same vertical as the others and blasted forward. Cannon? Check. And it fired _fast._ 626 laughed with delight and exhilaration as the other cruisers scattered in the path of the crazy ship flying right in their faces. This was even easier than the sims! Once he was through the fleet, they’d have to turn around to keep pursuing him, and flying in tight formation they couldn’t turn around as aggressively as he’d done without risking cooking each other with their exhaust.

There was just one problem. 626’s aggressive flying had taken him right into the middle of the pursuing fleet, and he was too short to see over the control console! He realized his mistake and stood up in his seat, peering around the panel, but it was too late. There was a loud bang as one of the cruisers, attempting to dodge a shot from the red cruiser’s cannon, veered straight into its underside. 626 was thrown against the canopy and the sides of the cockpit hard enough to turn a normal creature into a sack of broken bones, but landed back in the seat. Half the instrument panel went dark, and the other half filled with warning lights. Both engines were losing power, the left one had lost thrust vectoring and the nozzle was flopping around limply, and both hydraulic systems were rapidly losing pressure as the fluid inside boiled away into space. The side of the ship had been ripped open and was hemorrhaging thick black smoke. Lighter grey wisps started to curl from the panel. The cannon was offline, and based on his estimate of the angle of impact was probably gone completely. The other cruisers were closing in.

The experiment was still laughing, but more from relief and the rush of being thrown around than anything else. That was close! He knew if that ship had hit from the top, at best he’d be floating helpless in the vacuum of space, waiting for the other cruisers to pick him off. Actually, that might still happen: the ship was crippled and almost uncontrollable.

Then he noticed a yellow and black lever on the left side of the panel. Seriously? This thing had hyperdrive? Not bothering to open the safety panel, he simply smashed his fist through and pulled the lever out.

“Hyperdrive activated,” said the computer. “System charging.” Great, it still worked. “Warning: Guidance is not functional,” the computer added. Uh oh. 626 looked out the window at the cruisers closing in on him. He didn’t have time to fix this! But with his engines failing, he wouldn’t have the power for a second jump! That meant a blind jump was nothing short of suicidal. The chances of getting anywhere near a planet were effectively zero, let alone a habitable one. All he could do was wait for his life support to run out. Unless… unless he input the destination manually. Coordinates leapt unbidden into the experiment’s mind. _Quadrant 17, Section 005, Area 51,_ and so on. He’d never heard of that: where was his brain telling him to go? It didn’t matter, anywhere was better than here.

Unknown to Experiment 626, Jumba had programmed the coordinates and several other sets into his genome. They were the locations of several primitive backwater planets, not members of the Galactic Federation, which Jumba had selected as test sites for his experiments’ destructive capabilities. From Turo, the closest happened to be the third of eight out from a mid-sized (for stars hosting inhabited worlds, at least) yellow-white star. It was the largest rocky body in its system, but was dwarfed by the outer four planets, all giants. It orbited near the inner edge of its habitable zone, along with one large moon. But all 626 knew were the basics needed for hyperspace navigation: the star and planet’s orbital characteristics. Quickly crunching the numbers in his head based on the current galactic time, he determined where it would be at the time of his jump and tapped the numbers into the keypad. Ignoring the computer’s repeated warnings to not activate Hyperdrive, 626 gripped the lever with all four hands and rammed it back into position, flinging the tiny spacecraft into the unknown.

* * *

 

**Author's Notes:**

•    Oh my god… Lilo and Stitch is a MASTERPIECE. Seriously, it is amazing. Most of the movie can be summarized as a non-stop ride on the feels express, but the opening? It’s gotta be up there in the top 5 action scenes ever in a Disney film. Anyway, when I rewatched the movie I found myself asking: what exactly is Stitch thinking? That turned out to be a very interesting question, because throughout the movie we see very little of his destructive programming. The only things he destroys intentionally, and without some other reason behind it, are a pillow and some stuff in Lilo’s room. Everything else is either self-preservation (Lilo and Nani’s house when Jumba attacks), retaliation (that one guy’s super soaker, some dude who got hit with a volleyball), accidental (various things during the job search montage, spraying a smoothie all over the kitchen while trying to find out what a blender does). He really does act a lot like a small child exploring his environment and learning how to socially interact with other intelligent beings. Even building a city and pretending to be a giant monster is normal little kid behavior (Calvin does this quite a bit). He also has a short attention span, and despite his incredible intelligence most of his behavior is driven by emotion. Emotionally, he’s still the equivalent of a small child.  
•    It might seem odd for an invincible alien superweapon to be scared of a few guns. But he looks visibly freaked out when Jumba shoots at him with a plasma blaster, despite later being able to catch its shots with his bare hands. The conclusion? Stitch doesn’t know how durable he actually is. He’s also pretty jumpy when he first lands on Earth, what with the shooting at raindrops. It seems odd… but fear is exactly what you WANT a living weapon to have, at least one like Stitch. A one-shot kamikaze attacker? Maybe. But being about to lift thousands of times your body weight is not actually that much in terms of destructive power: that puts his maximum strength somewhere around a couple hundred tons, which is scary but NOT apocalyptic. Even assuming his strength is based on extra-heavy gravity and doesn’t account for the awesome power of adrenaline, Stitch would still lose a tug of war with a space shuttle orbiter (not counting the SRBs which add several times more thrust), or just ONE of the engines from the first stage of a Saturn V. For just one of him to be effective he has to use his durability and intelligence to stay alive, continue to cause havoc, and annoy the enemy into causing massive collateral damage in their futile attempts to get rid of him. Regardless of Jumba’s boasting about his only instinct being destruction, 626’s primary instinct is the same as any other intelligent creature: self-preservation. Fear serves a fundamental biological purpose. What sets Stitch apart is that he was created with something it takes most humans months or years of training to learn: the ability to be scared without panicking.  
•    To add to this… it’s misleading to say Lilo turned Stitch from evil to good. Stitch was NEVER evil. Nor is he much of a criminal. At best, the Federation wanted to ship him off to some prison camp for life for what’s basically contempt of court. At worst, they wanted to do the same thing because he existed. There is no evidence that he was even given a trial – JUMBA was the one on trial, Stitch was just evidence. Apparently artificial organisms don’t have any rights. The worst thing he did was use Lilo to keep Jumba, the one being who should have had his back, from shooting him. And IMO, by the first night at Lilo’s house Stitch knew on some level that this was his home.  
•    Stitch getting “spacesick” is completely plausible. His nervous system is hardwired to pilot spacecraft and to fight onboard them, including having a good sense of balance – and the inherent drawback of that is that he has to rely heavily on both his eyes and his inner ears. When your eyes and inner ears give you conflicting information, the body tends to suspect poisoning – which would be a major threat to Stitch because there are just plain too many molecules out there to be immune to all of them (and his eating habits don’t help either).  
•    Okay, seriously though… restraining prisoners upside-down like that is messed up. Even aside from the “how do they go to the bathroom” issue, blood would be constantly pooled in your head. This would be extremely uncomfortable, and could cause nasty health problems like strokes in creatures that aren’t nearly-indestructible genetic experiments.  
•    Watching the sequence of Stitch figuring out how to beat the plasma cannons over and over and the guard getting annoyed at him totally gave me the mental image of Stitch acting like a little kid on a long car trip.  
•    The dino-like security aliens have a very good reason to be wearing those white jumpsuits and face masks, and it’s NOT to be intimidating like Stormtroopers. Plasma blasters in L&S spatter molten metal everywhere if they hit a metal surface. I’m pretty sure the white suits are meant to protect them from being burned if someone misses and hits the wall behind them – this is similar to how a lot of modern military body armor isn’t designed to stop you from getting shot, it’s designed to protect against shrapnel. Stitch is heat-resistant enough that to him it’s like getting hit by tiny drops of hot water; enough to sting, but not enough to cause actual burns. Pulling solidified slag out of your fur can’t be fun, though.  
•    The gravity thing is speculation, but it’s based on Jumba’s physiology. He has huge, beefy limbs, a squat body, and elephant-like feet, which is exactly the build you’d expect of a creature evolved to cope with high gravity. Also, without it Stitch would be quite a bit weaker than people think he is because most of the fandom seems to severely overestimate his weight.  
•    It’s interesting that Stitch’s skin is tough enough to ignore plasma blasts, road rash, explosions, and rocket exhaust… but a needle goes right through it. Also, funnily enough that moment is a serious contender for the most blood ever shown in a Disney cartoon. There are a few red scratches and bloodstains on clothing, but otherwise you’ve got… Malificent bleeding a little bit when stabbed with a sword, Taran getting a cut lip in The Black Cauldron, and I think that’s it. The moral? To get blood past the censors, just make it pink.  
•    Regarding hyperdrive: the vast majority of the space in the galaxy is light years from the nearest star. The vast majority of space in the universe is millions of light years from the nearest galaxy. Forget Han Solo: the risk of flying through a star is infinitesimal. The real danger is being stranded with a broken hyperdrive in a location where your sub-light engines can’t get you to safety. The problem with interstellar navigation to a planet with a single hyperspace jump, though, is that everything is moving at dozens of kilometers per second, so in a crippled ship with no propulsion you have to calculate exactly where your target will be. Fortunately, Stitch’s brain has the raw processing power to do this in about a second and ignore the broken nav computer.  
•    You might notice that at a couple points Stitch goes through a fairly extensive thought process in what’s only about a second in the movie. Well, that’s what “can think faster than supercomputer” means!


	2. Chapter 2

When Experiment 626 emerged from hyperspace, the first thing he noticed was the smell of smoke. He felt the ship vibrate, and heard metal groan and alarms blare. He opened his eyes, and they immediately started to water. Something in the control console was burning, and the cockpit was filled with a thin haze of acrid smoke. He blinked to infrared vision. Yep, it was hot. Returning to normal vision, he peered out of the canopy. The stars were all unfamiliar, and an enormous blue globe loomed ahead. Somewhere off behind the planet was a star, bright white with no atmosphere to scatter its light. On the other side of his vision, coincidentally appearing about the same size, was the pale crescent of a moon. He was on the night side of the planet, but his sensitive eyes could still pick out faint blues and greens in the reflected moonlight. He didn’t recognize the shapes. Where was he?

At the moment, it didn’t matter. The planet had to only be a couple thousand klicks away, and it was getting closer fast. He had to stop his descent and get the cruiser into a stable orbit in a hurry. He grabbed the control stick and pulled hard. But all that happened was a loud bang. 626 scampered onto the headrest of his seat and looked out the back – the rear cameras were all disabled. Flames shot out of the craft, and he could see pieces of engine twinkling in the starlight as they flew away. Not good. Worse, the ship slowly started to rotate, pushed by the small thrust of the gases venting from the various holes in its side.

 _“Chootah!”_ 626 swore, and punched the dashboard, denting and tearing the plastic. It was soft, sticky, and very hot. Diverting his attention, he looked at the various warning lights. O2 levels were fine, but cabin pressure was low, and slowly falling. He had a leak somewhere. His hydraulics were completely dead, which was fine since so were both engines. He switched the control mode from thrust vectoring to reaction thrusters – these were normally turned off when the engines were running, but were used for attitude control and maneuvering during docking (626 had ignored this since he didn’t care if the Turo got cooked by exhaust) - and tried again. Nothing happened, apart from the smoke coming from the console getting thicker. Uh oh. This was serious: he had no control over the ship whatsoever. And then there was the smoke. He took a deep breath and threw the switch to activate the onboard fire suppression systems. Again, nothing.

All he could do now was figure out what kind of planet he was about to crash-land on. The ship was spinning too fast now for him to clearly focus. He carefully pushed off from his seat, stopping his rotation and floating in the middle of the cockpit. He peered at the world. It was a mixture of deep blue and dark green. The blue could have been vegetation on a planet of an orange or red star, but for this one that was unlikely. And the green?

626 looked at the thin layer of haze on the limb of the planet. It was blue-white. That was encouraging: the atmosphere wasn’t full of chlorine, which meant the green had to be vegetation, and the blue had to be ocean. But an ocean of what? He blinked to infrared. By the color of the ocean and the land, he could tell the approximate temperature of it. There was enough variance in the sea temperature that the atmosphere had to be fairly thin, which made it far too warm for the liquid to be ammonia, methane, or anything like that, meaning it could only be water. A second look at the atmosphere confirmed this: his infrared version allowed for basic spectral analysis, and the strong absorption bands of water vapor were visible… and oxygen! 626 let out a squeal of delight. He could survive on the surface! The vast majority of species in the federation were water-oxygen based. There were plenty of worlds with other types of life, but they tended to have crustal or atmospheric characteristics which didn’t lend themselves to the development of spaceflight. As the view of the planet faded in the smoke, he noticed something else: city lights! Perfect!

There was just one problem. 626 needed both water and oxygen to survive, but they had to be separate. He had to breathe air. Jumba’s tests had shown that his body’s density was just barely low enough for him to stay afloat in highly-concentrated sodium chloride brine if he kept his lungs fully inflated, breathed shallowly, and paddled as fast as he could, and he could actually float in solutions of heavier salts like potassium iodide. But in dilute water solutions, he sank like a rock. And as he got closer to the planet, all he could see below him was blue. The smoke was getting too thick to see, and the lights soon vanished. 626 started to cough. Making an experiment resistant to heat was one thing, but a fire onboard a spacecraft produced thousands of different noxious chemicals and it was impossible even for Jumba to design immunity to all of them. He spotted a few tiny points of light amid the blue-black ocean before the canopy became too fogged to see out of, but he couldn’t steer! There was no way to reach them. Growling, he grabbed onto the control stick and used it to push his face against the polyglass. The sun had vanished behind the planet now, and he couldn’t have more than a minute before he hit the atmosphere.

Earthlings’ primitive spacecraft, with their inefficient engines, had to save every gram of fuel they could, so to land they relied on the atmosphere itself to slow them down all the way from orbital speed to subsonic, requiring heavy ablative heat shields and a precise entry trajectory. Federation ships had much better drive systems, could afford to fire their engines a bit outside the atmosphere to slow their motion to a crawl and descend relatively gently. The police cruisers were sturdy little craft, though. In a pinch, their lifting body shape let them aerobrake from orbital speed, at least around smaller planets. In the best of circumstances, the damage to the ship’s underside would necessitate a complete overhaul before returning to flight, though, and this was not the best of circumstances. The collision had ripped the plasma cannon and its protective cover from the belly of the spacecraft, opening up a gaping hole. The ship couldn’t have reentered safely at any angle, and without engines, hydraulics, or reaction thrusters it was in an uncontrollable tumble. Even worse, it was streaking towards the Pacific Ocean at a speed and angle far greater it was ever meant to withstand.

Under the circumstances, many pilots would have overridden the safety protocols and vented the cockpit to space, preferring a peaceful death from hypoxia to suffocating in the choking smoke, burning to death in a flashover, or being ripped apart as the ship disintegrated around them. Others would have intentionally detonated the engine cores, blowing the ship into tiny pieces and reducing the danger of debris hitting the ground. 626 considered venting the cockpit for a very different reason: fires needed oxygen. So did he, but unlike humans and most aliens, his lungs were strong enough that he could hold his breath in vacuum, and fire couldn’t. He decided against it: it would be depressurized in a few seconds anyway. Letting go of the controls, he clung to his seat with all four hands and fumbled for his seatbelt in the smoke. If he was alive when he hit the ocean, his only hope was to cling to floating debris, and the foam cushions were the most likely candidate.

Smoke became fire. 626 felt the tingle of flames licking at his jumpsuit. He screwed his eyes shut and waited. There was a roar and the ship yawed violently. Now! He sucked in a deep breath and clamped his mouth shut.

Earth’s upper atmosphere hit the police cruiser like a brick wall. The ship spun, tumbled, and flipped faster and faster, pieces melting and flying off. It rolled inverted, and the canopy shattered. A wall of air slammed into 626 at over fifty times the speed of sound, forcing him into his seat. The smell of burning plastic and electronics was replaced by nostril-burning ionized air being forced up his nose and into his sinuses. The heat was almost unbearable, even for him, and a blinding blue-white light forced its way through his eyelids. He wanted to scream, but he couldn’t: trying to take another breath would boil the fluid in his lungs. He no longer had any idea which way was up. The cruiser was breaking up around him: the engines were ripped away, fuselage panels fell apart, and eventually the reactor core was breached, engulfing the ship in a brilliant green flame. The seat belt burned through, the foam of the cushion started to evaporate, and 626 flinched as drops of molten metal from the fuselage hit him with the force of bullets. His lungs were starting to burn from holding his breath. This was it… it didn’t matter how strong his grip was, any second the structure of the ship itself would give way and he’d be flung off into the ocean.

Then WHAM! The cruiser smashed into the forests of Kaua’i, still travelling over the speed of sound. The reactor exploded completely, splintering trees like matchsticks and stripping away their bark and branches. A colossal ball of green flame rose into the sky, along with several tons of pulverized soil and hundreds of pieces of burning debris. The ship’s structure completely disintegrated: denser components buried themselves dozens of feet underground, lighter ones were carried aloft by the rising plume of superheated air, and those in between lay strewn about the new crater.

Experiment 626 groaned and pushed himself to his feet. He rubbed his eyes, blinking away dust, and waited for his sight and hearing to return to normal. The crater slowly swam into focus: pulverized boulders, soil turned to glass by the explosion, and burning spacecraft wreckage lay everywhere. None of this… none of this quite felt real, not even his own body. Everything was numb. He knew things were supposed to hurt, but somehow didn’t… at least, not more than a strange, fuzzy ache. His head seemed like it was full of smoke. Was this what being dead felt like? No… wait… he was breathing. He was breathing air. It was uncomfortably hot, but it definitely wasn’t water. This wasn’t the bottom of the ocean, it was land. 626 could hardly believe it… he was alive! He’d actually hit one of the tiny specks of light in the middle of the sea.

Still dazed, 626 looked down at his limbs. All six were still there, and although he couldn’t feel them fully, he could at least move them. He curled and uncurled the claws on each hand in turn, flexed his back spines, and reached up and touched his antennae and ears. Running his upper hands down his chest, 626 broke into a smile. Even the stupid jumpsuit was mostly intact. Or at least melted to his fur.  
Now what? He surveyed the wreckage. Was there anything salvageable? After several minutes of sniffing around and digging through the rubble, he managed to unearth four battered plasma blasters. They were tiny; there was no way he was blowing through a steel door with these things. But still, they were weapons. After some experimentation trying to find something he could use as a holster, he realized he could just stick them to the melted plastic on his back. Now to explore the strange planet he’d landed on. He clambered up to the rim of the crater. It was… surreal. The surface was covered in vegetation, from tall, woody trees to a tangle of leafy undergrowth. But in the distance, he could see lights! _“Oocha! Chabata! Van Schiziz!” (I’m free! Come and get me, [untranslatable expletive] police!)_ he cheered, laughing with delight as he scampered down the fresh rubble slope to the forest, then onto what seemed to be some sort of runway.

The lights could only mean one thing, and the pavement confirmed it. Civilization. The very thing 626 was created to destroy. At the moment, though, the experiment was seeking them out for other reasons. The exhilarating, almost euphoric rush of adrenaline he’d felt when he regained consciousness was fading, and his nerves were starting to recover from the numbness caused by the intense heat of reentry. He was hungry, thirsty, and exhausted. And as his mind started to work properly again, he realized he had no idea what dangers this unfamiliar world held.

626 had never been outdoors before. The entire world he knew was Jumba’s lab, the councilroom, and the interiors of various spaceships. The jungle was completely different. Even with his excellent night vision, he couldn’t see far in the dense trees and undergrowth, and his sensitive ears were flooded with hundreds of different sounds – faint rustles, buzzes, tiny footsteps, and a low rumble far in the distance. What was out there? He decided to stick to the runway. He was confident that no creature there could threaten him physically, but one thing he knew he wasn’t immune to was poisons; the gas the police had flooded the room with to subdue him when he was first captured was proof of that.

Something hit the ground behind him. 626 jumped, drawing a blaster and firing. Nothing. Then something cold and wet hit him on the head. Alarmed, he drew a second blaster and shot it into the air. Again, nothing, except thousands of fat drops of water falling from the sky. In a couple seconds, he went from hungry, thirsty, and exhausted to hungry, thirsty, exhausted, and soaked. He hissed angrily at the sky. He wanted water, but not like this! Some drops fell on his tongue. They tasted fine, but he wasn’t going to just stand there all night with his mouth open.

Then something croaked. 626 whipped his head around, drawing yet another blaster and aiming all three of them at a strange creature sitting on the pavement. It was a four-limbed quadruped, much smaller than him, with no clothing and smooth green skin. Ahh… a local! 626 carefully advanced on the creature, keeping his guns trained on it. _“Taka Tatay!” (Take me to your leader!)_ he ordered. The creature didn’t respond. 626 poked at it with a blaster barrel. _“Sansay! Sansay!” (Quickly! Quickly!)_

  
The creature still ignored him. 626 was about to ask if it was deaf or just stupid when the low rumble he’d been hearing for a long time suddenly grew much louder. Yellow lights flooded his vision, and a horn blared. He turned. A large, wheeled vehicle of some sort sped towards him. That noise… was an engine? He hadn’t recognized it, it was far different from the electric motors and fusion turbines used by Federation technology, although he could hear the faint whine of a very small turbine. It didn’t matter though; it had a cab, which meant shelter from the downpour. He drew his fourth blaster and trained all of them on the vehicle. “Aggaba-“ he shouted. He was trying to say Stop or I’ll shoot, but was cut off when the vehicle’s front tire rolled straight over him. Thus, 626 learned his first important lesson about Earth. Primitive, heavily loaded vehicles on wet pavement stopped far more slowly than expected.

Being run over did far more damage to the trucks than it did to 626. Any Earth animal small enough to fit under the tires of a 40 ton semi would have been flattened by its weight, but his rigid skeleton acted like a speed bump. Tires blew out or were shredded by his claws, mud flaps were torn off, and axles and suspensions broke. Only the third truck, which had enough time to slow down more, was able to leave the scene of the accident under its own power. After being pried from under its fender, 626 was driven to the local animal shelter while the other two drivers waited in their cabs for tow trucks to arrive. His extra limbs and back spines were mistaken for severely broken bones by the horrified drivers, who were amazed that the strange creature was still breathing. Nobody wanted to look too closely at what appeared to be the mangled remains of somebody’s pet, not even the shelter workers, who gave up on trying to euthanize 626 after the fifth dose of pentobarbital failed to have any effect. He might not have been immune to all poisons, but on Kweltikwan barbiturate-rich seed pods were a popular snack food.

In fact, there was only one reason 626 remained unconscious for as long as he did: after the day he’d had, he needed the sleep.

 

* * *

 

**Author’s Notes:**

• …And that’s actually all, folks! This one’s a short fic for a change.  
• This chapter is brought to you by Kerbal Space Program and by the time I read the aeromedical report on the Columbia disaster.  
• Many of the things Stitch had to deal with have happened to real spacecraft. Obviously we don’t have space fighters shooting plasma cannons at each other, but we’ve had the following mishaps:  
o Collision in space. A Progress spacecraft bumped into Mir during docking, damaging the pressure vessel of one module and forcing it to be sealed off for the rest of the station’s lifetime.  
o Cabin depressurization. Happened to Soyuz 11 due to a faulty valve getting stuck while separating from the service module prior to reentry. Unfortunately, all crew were killed.  
o Fire in cabin. Happened to Apollo 1 – on the ground. Unfortunately, all crew were killed.  
o Multiple systems onboard spacecraft crippled by explosion. Happened to Apollo 13.  
o Spacecraft spun or pushed off course by venting gases. Happened to Apollo 13.  
o Breakup during reentry due to damage sustained earlier in flight. Happened to Space Shuttle Columbia. Unfortunately, all crew were killed.  
• A spaceship crash is far, far, FAR more violent than getting run over by a truck, and it was what really did the damage that lead to Stitch being knocked out for so long.  
• My theory is that Stitch didn’t wake up in the shelter with a splitting headache because of the impact of the trucks… it was because of dehydration. Accounting for waiting in a container for the trial, being transported from Turo’s surface to the Durgon, and being unconscious for what, around twelve hours, that’s a lot of time to not drink any water. Reentry made the problem worse: superheated, ionized air (i.e. plasma) was forced up his nose by the huge dynamic pressure, exposing his mouth and sinuses to immense heat that boiled away all the fluid there.  
• It is actually realistic for Stitch’s clothes to partially survive an unprotected reentry. Objects that reenter on a very fast, steep trajectory experience much higher heat flux, and the drag forces are extremely high, but the total amount of heat absorbed is lower because it’s so brief. Manned spacecraft usually perform shallow reentries because the g-forces in a steep reentry would require a much stronger and heavier spacecraft structure, and could be harmful to astronauts. In the Columbia disaster, nonmetallic parts like tires were recovered in a recognizable state, although the astronauts’ spacesuits didn’t fare as well.  
• Some people seem to think Stitch weighs something like a hundred pounds… no. Just no. The upper bound for Stitch’s weight can be determined from two facts: first, his physical size is about the same as a five-year-old girl, who would weigh about 40 lb, and David was able to save him from drowning. Lifeguards can save fairly heavy creatures because Earth animals, including humans, are about the density of water. The worst-case scenario is a man with low body fat, who might have a specific gravity of 1.08 with his lungs empty, about 5% denser than seawater. David is presumably a strong swimmer, so let’s say he could pull a 200 lb man that dense to the surface (this would be pretty difficult), overcoming about 10 lb of negative buoyancy. A 100 lb Stitch would have about 60 lb of negative buoyancy, equivalent to pulling SIX fairly large, dense men to the surface. A more reasonable value of Stitch’s weight is around 50 lb, giving him a specific gravity of 1.25 and about 10 lb of negative buoyancy (equivalent to a worst-case scenario human). He’d still sink like a rock in the ocean: that density is equivalent to a typical 160 lb man weighed down by 45 lb of lead weights. And Stitch’s strength wouldn’t help him much because his limbs can only physically displace so much water. On the other hand, in a hot, saturated sodium chloride solution with a specific gravity of 1.2, he’d be able to swim with some effort, similar to a man with low body fat. In solutions of heavier salts such as iodides, he could even float without significant effort, similar to how people can easily float in extremely salty bodies of water such as the Dead Sea. Speaking of which, Stitch would be about neutrally buoyant in the Dead Sea.  
• Incidentally, a 50 lb weight would also put Stitch around neutrally buoyant when wearing a normal child-sized life jacket – but he’d have to actively work to keep his nose out of the water.  
• Realistically the animal shelter would have been able to detect a heartbeat and breathing, so “we thought it was dead” probably meant “we didn’t think he’d be alive in the morning.” And they would probably have tried to put an animal that was run over by multiple semi trucks out of its misery, although they really shouldn’t have left Stitch in a kennel with other dogs. L&S doesn’t mention biochemical differences between species very often, but even on Earth, there are a ton of substances that humans regularly eat that are poisonous to many species – for example, caffeine, theobromine (in chocolate), and an unknown substances in grapes are all very bad for dogs. In designing Stitch to be able to survive on hundreds of different worlds, he would have had to make sure he wouldn’t be poisoned by eating random plants, which would require covering a lot of different molecules. Barbiturates are fairly simple molecules, comparable to caffeine or theobromine, so there’s no reason that alien plants shouldn’t use them to poison predators, or for other species to evolve to enjoy eating those poisons.


End file.
